Theoretically as well as empirically, paraphrase is a pivotal concept in many academic and nonacademic fields. And yet, its investigation has made very slow progress, due mainly to the lack of a framework that is versatile enough to deal with the nebulous nature of paraphrase in use. This paper demonstrates how the mechanisms of FrameNet can be utilized as a resource for systematic and coherent research into paraphrase. The semantic framework it provides, including detailed frame descriptions, frame-to-frame relations, and the recording of syntactic information, allows one to see in more principled ways why some set of sentences can be considered paraphrases of each other.